[lltx] Re: xunicode & euenc

[Francois Charette]

On 26/03/2010 09:58, Khaled Hosny wrote:
>
>> Nah, I think the current approach of forking xunicode for this purpose is best for now. Even if it's only for EU2 (i.e., just for LuaTeX).
>>      
> But Ross won't support it, and I doubt we can (I myself can't even read
> that code! yet to debug/fix it), but if you think you can maintain that
> fork, so be it.
>
> But again, if it were me I'd just define what xunicode is supposed to do
> and then do it from scratch in a way we can maintain. I believe this is
> the right time for us to do all sorts of experimental packages; luatex
> still in beta stage, so we can't claim our code is stable, but if we
> wait longer, I'm afraid we will eventually fall into TeX's legacy trap
> and keep every thing as is because it is supposed to be stable.
>    

Just a side-note to the above discussion:
While I can think of situations where xunicode can be really useful, I 
personally never used it and would rather suggest to anyone who has 
legacy documents that contain illegible horrors like
Mu\d{h}ammad Na\d{s}\={\i}r al-D\={\i}n al-\d{T}\=us\={\i} (to employ a 
common example from my field) and wishes to use them in XeTeX or LuaTeX 
to simply convert the documents to UTF-8 first. I have written a pretty 
complete tool "latex2utf8" that does this, and it covers pretty much 
everything that is in xunicode.sty, and some more. It is currently 
bundled with Biber (a backend for biblatex written in Perl), but I 
intend to upload it to CPAN at some point (once decode options have been 
implemented). See http://bit.ly/aFqxSz and http://bit.ly/9gc4s8 for the 
source code.

François

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